Reading Troy — chapter 58 of 74 · Odyssey, Book 8

Odyssey, Book 8 — Demodocus Sings of Troy (Day 33 of the poem's main action, tenth year after Troy's fall; the assembly-ground, athletic field, and palace hall of the Phaeacians on Scheria)

At dawn Alcinous takes Ulysses down to the Phaeacian assembly-place by the harbour. Athena, in the form of a herald, moves through the town summoning the people; she pours grace over Ulysses's head and broadens his shoulders for the audience that gathers. Alcinous proposes the day: a new ship to be drawn down to the sea and manned with fifty-two young oarsmen for the stranger's escort that night; a great banquet in the palace; the bard Demodocus to sing. The plan is acclaimed.

The animals are slaughtered — twelve sheep, eight white-tusked boars, two shambling oxen. Pontonous brings in Demodocus, the blind bard whom the Muse loved above all others, giving him the gift of song but taking the light of his eyes, sets him on a silver-studded chair against a pillar, hangs his lyre on a peg above his head, and lays a basket of food and a cup at his elbow. The company eats. Demodocus, moved by the Muse, sings his first song: the quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles at a feast at Troy, in violent words, while Agamemnon was secretly pleased — for Apollo at Pytho had foretold that this would be the beginning of the evil. The song belongs to the lost cyclic poem the Cypria or the Iliupersis. Ulysses pulls his great purple mantle over his head and weeps unseen, lifts it to pour libation, drops it again as the song goes on. Only Alcinous, sitting beside him, hears the heavy breathing.

Alcinous moves the company outdoors to athletic games. Let the stranger tell his people what we Phaeacians are best at. They run, wrestle, box, jump, throw the discus. Clytoneus the king's son wins the foot-race; Euryalus son of Naubolus wins the wrestling; Amphialus the long-jump; Elatreus the discus; Laodamas, Alcinous's eldest, the boxing. Laodamas comes up to invite the stranger to compete. Ulysses refuses politely — I have suffered too much; my mind is on home, not on games. Euryalus, the handsome wrestler, sneers across the field: you have the look of a merchant captain, not an athlete; you came here as a man who knows nothing of sport. Ulysses goes cold. Your face is fair but your mind is empty. The gods do not give every grace to every man. You have insulted me; you have made me angry. He stands up, takes a discus larger and heavier than the Phaeacians have been using, spins, and hurls it whistling clear past the furthest peg; Athena, in human form, marks the throw and calls out no Phaeacian throw will come near it. He turns and challenges any Phaeacian to come forward in any sport: I will not box Laodamas; he is my host; but otherwise come. He boasts of his archery — only Philoctetes among the Achaeans at Troy was a better bow than I, and he will not contest with the great dead like Heracles or Eurytus who challenged Apollo and were killed.

Alcinous, gracefully smoothing the air, replies that the Phaeacians are not fighters or wrestlers but lovers of dance and song, of fine cloth and warm baths and good beds. He calls for the dancers and for Demodocus to play. A smoothed dancing-ground; the best young men perform; Ulysses, watching their footwork, is amazed.

Demodocus sings his second song. The song-within-the-song is the only place in Homer where the Olympian gods are made comic: Mars (Ares) and Venus (Aphrodite) carry on an adultery in the house of Vulcan (Hephaestus) the lame husband; the Sun, who sees everything, brings word to Vulcan; the smith forges an invisible net of unbreakable bronze chains, lays it about the marriage-bed, pretends to leave for Lemnos; Mars sees the husband go and runs to the bed; the chains spring, the lovers cannot move; Vulcan calls in all the gods to look. The gods crowd in (the goddesses for shame stay home) and roar with laughter. Apollo asks Mercury: would you take a triple net to lie with Venus like that? Mercury answers: triple — yes, and with every god watching. Neptune negotiates the release; Mars flees to Thrace; Venus to Cyprus. The Phaeacians are delighted; Ulysses too. Then Laodamas and Halius do an exhibition ball-dance — one arches back and throws a red ball at the clouds, the other leaps and catches it, then they tap-dance while passing it; the crowd stamps applause.

Alcinous calls for gifts. Each of the twelve aldermen plus the king will give Ulysses a clean robe, a tunic, and a talent of gold. Euryalus is told to make amends; he comes forward and offers his bronze sword with silver hilt and ivory scabbard, with a formal blessing on your voyage. Ulysses accepts gracefully. Arete sets a great chest in the centre of the hall; the gifts are packed; she warns him to bind the chest himself against thieves on the ship — he ties it with a knot Circe taught him. He is bathed in warm water (his first bath since Calypso), oiled, dressed, and led to supper. Passing the door-pillar he meets Nausicaa for the last time. She speaks the goodbye that has broken every reader's heart since: Farewell, stranger, and when you are at home in your own country, do not forget me — for it is to me first that you owe your life. He answers: Daughter of great Alcinous, if Zeus grants me to come home, I shall pray to you there every day as to a god, for it was you who saved me.

At supper Ulysses cuts the best of the chine of roast pork and sends it across to Demodocus with a message: bards are honoured by all men, for the Muse loves them. Then he asks for one more song. Sing of the Wooden Horse, which Epeus made with Athena's help, and which I myself led up to the citadel of Troy. Demodocus takes up the song from the moment the Greeks burn their tents and sail to Tenedos; the Trojans drag the horse inside; they debate cutting it open, hurling it from the rock, leaving it as a votive; the city is doomed because they keep it. Then the men inside come down, the city is sacked, Odysseus with Menelaus rages like Mars to the house of Deiphobus, where the most terrible fight of the night took place, and there by the help of Athena he conquered. Ulysses, hearing his own most savage moment narrated, weeps the great Homeric simile: as a woman weeps and clings to her husband fallen before his own city in the defence of his children, screaming as the enemies beat her on the back and shoulders and lead her into slavery. He weeps as the women of Troy wept that he made weep. Only Alcinous sees. The king stops the song. He turns to the stranger and asks the question that has waited four books: Tell us your name. Where are you from? What are your people? Why do you weep when you hear of the Argives at Troy? Did you lose a kinsman there — son-in-law, father-in-law, sworn brother?

Analysis

Chapter 0058 — Analysis

The poem watching itself sung

Book 8 is the Odyssey's most explicit moment of self-reflection. Demodocus the blind bard sings three songs at the Phaeacian court while the hero of the third song sits in the audience weeping. The Odyssey is a poem about a man who has not yet returned home, listening to the poetry his exploits have already become. Kleos — the spreading fame — has reached Scheria before the man himself has reached Ithaca; he hears himself sung before his wife knows whether he is alive. The image is one of the foundational images of Western literature: the hero before whom his own legend is performed.

Three songs, deliberately spaced. The first (the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles at a Trojan feast) belongs to a lost cyclic poem; the second (Mars and Venus caught in Vulcan's net) is the only comic episode about the Olympians in Homer; the third (the Wooden Horse and the sack of Troy) is the part of the cycle the Iliad refuses to narrate and the Posthomerica fills in. Ulysses weeps at the first and the third — the war-songs. At the comic middle song he laughs along with the Phaeacians. The structure tells us what the Odyssey is saying about song: that it can be played for laughter when it is about other people, but turns to grief when it touches the listener's own life.

The simile of the captive woman

The simile that ends the third song is one of the most extraordinary in Greek poetry. Ulysses weeps as a woman weeps and clings to her husband fallen before his own city in defence of his children, screaming as the enemies beat her on the back and shoulders and lead her into slavery. The poem reaches for the comparison and lands precisely on the woman Ulysses himself helped to make: a wife of one of the Trojan dead at the sack of Troy. The hero is compared, in the moment of his own grief, to the women he widowed. The Odyssey at this moment is doing the most morally severe thing the poem ever does — making Ulysses identify, at the level of poetic figure, with Andromache. The simile is the poem's quiet judgement on the war.

The comic interlude

The middle song, Mars and Venus in Vulcan's net, sits in the centre of the book like a held breath between two grief-passages. Critics from antiquity onward have asked why Homer (or "Homer") put a low farce into the most serious moment of the poem. Plato thought it impious and would have cut it from his ideal republic; Renaissance readers loved it (Botticelli's Mars and Venus is closer to this song than to any other source); modern scholarship sees it as the Phaeacians' own kind of song — light, courtly, sexual, civilised — what they would have asked Demodocus for if Ulysses had not been the guest. Between the two songs of Troy, the Phaeacians demonstrate the kind of poetry their utopia produces: a comedy of caught adulterers, in which even the gods are made to laugh at themselves. The Odyssey lets us see the alternative to its own seriousness.

Euryalus and the lesson in hospitality

The sneer of Euryalus is the only moment in Phaeacia where civility breaks down, and the poem's response is exemplary. Ulysses answers with a discus-throw and a speech (Butler renders the speech cleanly: the gods do not give every grace to every man); Alcinous instantly absorbs the offence with his praise of Phaeacian dancing and feasting (we are not boxers, we are lovers of fine baths); Euryalus is made to apologise and to give the most beautiful gift of the day, the silver-hilted sword in its ivory scabbard. The whole sequence is a manual of how a well-run court repairs a breach of xenia: insult, controlled response, host's deflection, formal apology, public gift. The poem keeps Ithaca always in mind as the negative image: at the suitors' hands a breach of hospitality will not be apologised for, and Ulysses will answer it not with a discus but with the bow.

Demodocus the blind bard and the poet's signature

Antiquity already read Demodocus as Homer's self-portrait. The blind bard at the court, beloved of the Muse, sitting on the silver-studded chair against the pillar with his lyre on its peg, fed by the patrons whose deeds he sings — this is Homer's own model of his profession. The blindness was already in the tradition. Whether Homer was blind or not, the poem's investment in the blind bard as the figure of the poet is enormous. Milton at the opening of Paradise Lost book 3 invokes Homer-as-Demodocus by name when he describes his own blindness: Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides / And Tiresias and Phineus prophets old. Borges, also blind in late life, wrote three poems and a story directly out of Demodocus.

The third song as Iliupersis fragment

Demodocus's third song is one of the closest things we have to the lost Iliou Persis — the cyclic epic of the sack of Troy. The Posthomerica (which our project will have just completed at chapter 0038, books 12–13) gives a long Quintus Smyrnaeus version. Demodocus's song supplies a different angle: the Trojan debate about what to do with the horse (cut it open, hurl it from the rock, dedicate it), and the specific detail of Odysseus and Menelaus going together to the house of Deiphobus — Deiphobus being the Trojan prince who married Helen after Paris was killed. The mention is brief but consequential. Virgil reads this passage with care: in Aeneid 6 Aeneas meets Deiphobus mutilated in the underworld and learns how he died at Helen's hand and Menelaus's. The whole genealogy of that Virgilian episode begins with this passing line of Demodocus.

The farewell of Nausicaa

Nausicaa's farewell at the door-pillar is the moment most readers remember from this book even more than the songs. She has nothing more to say — she has done what she will do — and yet she stands at the pillar to ask not to be forgotten. When you are home, do not forget that it is to me first you owe your life. The Odyssey could have ignored her here. It does not. It gives her the last brief encounter and Ulysses the right answer (I shall pray to you there every day as to a god), and then it lets her go. She is not seen again in the poem. The encounter with Nausicaa is one of the poem's perfectly closed sub-stories: meet, help, almost-marry, farewell.

What to watch for

• The three songs of Demodocus as a structural triptych: the first and third war-songs frame the middle comedy; Ulysses weeps at the war-songs and is the audience for them.
• The simile of the captive woman — the most morally severe simile in the poem, comparing Ulysses's grief to the grief of the women his war made widows.
• Euryalus's sneer and apology as a model of how xenia is repaired after a breach.
• The bath after the games — the second of the four ritual rebirths by bathing (river-mouth, here, the scar in book 19, before Penelope in book 23).
• Demodocus as Homer's self-portrait — the blind bard whose presence in the poem is the poem's signature.
• Alcinous's question at the close (tell us your name) — the cue for the four-book Apologoi that follow (Books 9–12, the Wanderings as Ulysses tells them).

Echoes across the cycle

Chapter 0058 — Echoes Across the Cycle

Backward echoes

Book 8 is the densest backward-echoing book in the Odyssey because two of Demodocus's three songs are the cycle. The first song — the quarrel of Odysseus and Achilles at a feast at Troy — belongs to the lost Cypria or to the early Iliupersis; Apollo's prophecy at Pytho that strife among the chiefs would mark the beginning of Troy's doom links this episode to the oracular machinery that opens the Iliad (Calchas's reading of Apollo's anger in Iliad 1). The third song narrates the sack of Troy — exactly the matter our project will have just finished in Posthomerica 12–13 (chapters 0036–0037). The Posthomerica's Quintus Smyrnaeus and the Odyssey's Demodocus give two angles on the same night: Quintus tells it from outside, narratively, panoramically; Demodocus tells it as a sung condensation that picks out the Trojan debate over the horse and the moment Odysseus and Menelaus reach Deiphobus's house. The Greek tradition of the sack of Troy is here folded into the poem as song. Helen and Deiphobus's marriage (which the Posthomerica notes; Aeneid 6 will narrate in horror) is the off-stage substance of the third song.

The athletic games rhyme with the funeral games of Patroclus in Iliad 23 — the same catalogue of contests (foot-race, wrestling, boxing, jumping, discus, archery), the same hierarchy of prizes, the same potential for offence. Iliad 23's games were Achilles's mourning rite for Patroclus; book 8's are the Phaeacians showing off to the stranger. The Iliadic original is funeral; the Odyssean variation is festival — the same form deployed for grief and for joy. Quintus's Posthomerica 4 ran the same series of games for Achilles's own funeral.

The middle song of Mars and Venus rhymes — by inversion — with Demodocus's other two songs. Olympian adultery is funny; Trojan adultery (Helen and Paris) was world-ending. The single thing that separates the comedy from the tragedy is mortality.

Forward echoes

• Alcinous's question at the close (tell us your name, where are you from, what people are yours, why do you weep at songs of Troy?) is the cue for the four-book Apologoi that follow. Books 9–12 are the Wanderings as Ulysses tells them at this hall — the most famous narrative inside a narrative in Western literature.
• The third song's mention of Deiphobus is the seed Virgil will harvest in Aeneid 6, where Aeneas meets Deiphobus's mutilated shade in the underworld and learns how Helen called Menelaus to murder him on the wedding-night of the sack. The Odyssey gives one line; the Aeneid grows the whole episode out of it.
• Demodocus as Homer's self-portrait survives into Milton (the Paradise Lost book 3 invocation places "blind Maeonides" in the poet's lineage), into Borges, into every later figure of the bard-as-author.
• The simile of the captive woman is one of the Iliad's and Odyssey's most haunting moments and will be read by every later war-poem. Virgil's Andromache in Aeneid 3 (the slave of Pyrrhus and then of Helenus, still weeping at Hector's empty tomb) is the figure inside this simile given her own scene. Quintus Smyrnaeus's lament-passages in Posthomerica 14 are written under the simile's pressure.
• The Mars-Venus song is the foundation of an entire Renaissance and post-classical genre: Lucretius opens De Rerum Natura with Venus subduing Mars; Botticelli's Mars and Venus (c.1485, National Gallery) paints the lovers post-coital with attendant fauns playing with the abandoned armour; Dryden's Astraea Redux uses the trope; every "love conquers war" allegory in Western art descends from this comic interlude.
• The bow-archery boast (only Philoctetes was a better bow than I at Troy) is one of three Odyssean boasts that fix Ulysses's bow as his recognition-attribute. Books 21 and 22 will turn this boast into the stringing-and-shooting that retakes the house.
• Nausicaa's farewell is a self-contained scene the Western tradition will rewrite endlessly: the encountered woman the hero must leave. Dido in Aeneid 4 is the same shape, given full tragic development. Calypso, Circe, Nausicaa, Dido — the four are one figure refracted four times.

Cast in this chapter

Chapter 0058 — Cast In This Chapter

On stage

• Odysseus — "Ulysses"; the guest in disguise, weeps at Demodocus's songs of Troy, hurls the discus, asks for the song of the Wooden Horse, prompts the asking of his name
• Alcinous — convenes the assembly, presides over games and feast, gives the gold goblet, presses the question of identity
• Nausicaa — appears once at the door-pillar to say goodbye; her last scene in the poem
• Athena — "Minerva"; takes the form of a herald to fill the assembly, beautifies Ulysses, marks the discus-throw

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — first song of Demodocus: the quarrel with Odysseus at a feast
• Agamemnon — first song: secretly pleased at the quarrel because of Apollo's oracle
• Apollo — named: the oracle at Pytho foretelling the strife; named as the spear-fearing god in the Mars-Venus song
• Aphrodite — "Venus"; the second song's adulteress
• Ares — "Mars"; the lover caught in the chains
• Hephaestus — "Vulcan"; the cuckolded smith who forges the net
• Hermes — "Mercury"; the wit of the gods' laughter at the net
• Poseidon — "Neptune"; negotiates the release of Mars
• Philoctetes — named by Ulysses as the only Achaean archer his superior at Troy
• Menelaus — named in the third song: at the door of Deiphobus's house with Odysseus
• Circe — named in advance: Ulysses ties the chest with a knot Circe taught him

Non-cast named figures: Demodocus the blind bard; Pontonous the wine-steward; Laodamas, Halius, Clytoneus (Alcinous's sons); Euryalus son of Naubolus (the sneer and the sword); Polybus (maker of the red ball used in the dance); Acroneos, Ocyalus, Elatreus, Nauteus, Prymneus, Anchialus, Eretmeus, Ponteus, Proreus, Thoon, Anabesineus, Amphialus son of Polyneus son of Tecton (the catalogue of Phaeacian competitors); Epeus (the craftsman of the Horse); Deiphobus (the Trojan prince whose house was sacked, soon to recur in Aeneid 6); the Sun, the Graces; Eurytus (the dead archer who challenged Apollo); Heracles (named as the great dead).

---

This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.